essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
It’s hard being a poet in 2020
Which is when this will be published
If you have the GUTS to publish it
Which I doubt
Being bitter & twisted
In response to your suicide letter, I write that I now order a bowl of vegetable ramen from the local Izakaya whose waitlist fills up twenty minutes before its five pm opening.
C.S. Barnes reflects on her complicated relationship with food through the years, from comfort eating to comfort starving. Features discussion of eating disorders.
I swam in the Gulf of Thailand with you.
I held you, small as a kumquat, in my own dark, small sea.
I often think of telling you
There is something wrong with time here.
I’m not sure whether I age faster or, quite the contrary –
Once we’re introduced again, I’ll be annoying in my youth.
She’s pulling up weeds from the flowerbed
And then starts feeling one tug back,
Wrapping her water grip and dragging her
Through the claggy earth.
I look at my bright and blotchy cheeks in the mirror with blurry-eyed fascination, but not for too long because I have crying to do.
Glossy lips, upturned in a cheesy grin. This is what I see when I think about the morning I left my country. The lips of a Ronald McDonald statue, painted red to match its garish hair and its clown’s outfit. Broad lips stretched into a smile that seemed much too bright under soulless eyes. I…
My earliest memories of goulash are full of warm, satisfying sensations—soft, chewy egg noodles draped in thick brown gravy and big chunks of beef adorned with a few key ingredients like green pepper, onion, and paprika.
An exploration of feminist indulgence, excess, and gratification via the colour red in Věra Chytilová’s Czech New Wave masterpiece Daisies (1966).
I had
one chance out of zero,
but spent a youth chasing
what I am still not.
Appel turns his professional interest in the workings of the human mind to a narrative exploration of the reasons we tell lies.
points for you if you are boss of the building, every lock
warm at your fingertips, every door’s soft click
yours as it shuts, every window with your face
reflected in it.
Above the house a low sun like a wrecking ball,
the world at the horizon splintered like a Rothko
i order a long black
he looks at me
man on man gaze
i smile
I want to feel
the warm milk of your smile.
I want to see your reflection
in the moon’s mirror, polished like spring bones.
Beautiful photographic studies of the outdoors in black and white.
She was not like unwitting prey,
That had never sighted the lion;
She fled from him, knowing
As she did what it meant…
i’d put stickers all over the moon
and hang it from the ceiling
in the living room
sunshine snacked on
a little
morning
Brown girl: you don’t get a plot twist. Your story’s been penned
with strokes as hollow as they are spiteful
For those who forego the languor of home ground, that lethal rapine of routine, the most compelling sound of the travelling life might be a ferry’s foghorn throughout the night
I receive a call from my mother. It is to tell me a recipe for tortang talong, which she learnt last night in a dream.
A drunk girl came up to me in a club last week and told me, yet again, that I look exactly, no, exACtly–Sarah! Come over here! Doesn’t she look exACtly like our Hannah?
In our conversation we discuss how Bex began her photographic journey and the point of photography, the ways in which food can become subversive and suggestive, and the My Chemical Romance reunion.
